At the Grabvine Gateway
by Eisenschrott
Summary: Teenaged Cadet Maketh Tua's drill day on a jungle planet goes from bad to worse. The solution comes with two rocket engines.


Shrugging her sore shoulders to shift the straps of her rucksack, a blessed split second of relieved weight, Cadet Maketh Tua cast a glance up. Thin water drops fell on her helmet visor from the canopy of leaves. No point wiping them off, her grimy hand would only smudge the transparisteel worse—that had been Swamp Survival Lesson Number 1, as far as Maketh was concerned.

Phebe groaned. "Don't tell me it's raining again."

"Nope. It just trickles off the trees." Lesson Number 2: the trees are a gutter.

"Ah yeah. Delayed rain gotta catch up."

"Basically."

Maketh had never seen so many trees in her life. She knew there were rain forests in the equatorial zones of her homeworld, but it was nowhere she'd visited. Phebe, judging by the things she'd called the jungle since the drill had begun and they'd plodded their way from one rendezvous point to the next, had no better experience than her, either. The few other cadets they'd met at the rendezvous were grim-covered things, hunched under the full rucksacks. Lieutenant Lukash had half-jokingly said, in yesterday's briefing, one of the reasons why they weren't allowed to carry a comlink in this drill was that they'd clutter the bandwidth by complaining about the weather, the terrain, and the insects.

"What's that thing over there?"

She turned to see Phebe peering over the grassy crest they were trudging up, blaster rifle wrapped in waterproof canvas at the top of her rucksack, hands holding onto two purple bulbous tree trunks, about ten steps behind her. A part of Maketh's mind, that never stopped calculating grades and spoke in Lieutenant Lukash's voice, scoffed and struck Cadet Phebe Zataire's name off the commendation list.

"Looks like a wrecked fighter or something…"

"Phebe, let's get going."

"…no, wait, I stand corrected—holy moons, it's a podracer!"

Maketh sighed, giving a tug at the rucksack straps; it felt heavier when you weren't walking. "Yes, so what? Grabvine Gateway used to be a racing circuit. Some idiot got killed, because that's what the idiots who watch podraces pay their tickets to see. Nice discovery. Now move along."

Phebe stood where she was, even bent a bit more forward. "Looks well-preserved," she muttered. "You can still see the paint job. Pretty neat. Hey, want to bet five credits that cockpit is salvaged military equipment?"

"Phebe, for the love of—"

Phebe let out a scream and took a jump back, away from the trees. On instinct, Maketh raised and aimed her blaster, but could barely register a slithering movement up the trunk, a flicker of something scaly that disappeared into the leaves.

 _Oh, stars, no._

She dashed to Phebe, who had collapsed to the mucky ground and was clutching her right arm to her chest, the camouflage uniform sleeve pulled up to the elbow. "What the kriff was that? Son of a Hutt, look here." An oval-shaped mark, made up of awful many needle-sized holes, had appeared on her tanned skin. There was no blood, but the wound… bruise… _bite_ had a stark white colour. Maketh tried to wipe the stuff off with the hem of her poncho, but it seemed to disappear downwards inside the tiny cuts.

"Say, straight-A girl, what does the monster manual call this beast?" Phebe said in a high-pitched voice.

Maketh dropped her blaster and slung the rucksack off her shoulders, wrenched the first aid kit out of its pocket and tied the hemostatic lace around Phebe's arm, a bit lower than the elbow. Then she sprayed the wound with anti-septic. She had no idea if that could help, just like she had no idea what creepy crawler had bitten Phebe, and what its bite did to Human physiology. The lieutenant had briefed the class on the most common venomous creatures they would meet on Baroonda, but the holo-slides themselves said it was not a comprehensive list, and none of the nightmare fuel they'd shown resembled the thin oval ring that was spreading a sickly shade of white over Phebe's skin.

"It itches." Phebe's hand started shaking, and she gaped at it. "It… it doesn't even hurt."

"Tell me you smuggled a comlink. Please."

Phebe shook her head, still staring at her arm. "I guess it's pointless to ask _you_ , Miss Follow-Every-Single-Directive—" She broke into a cough and snatched the canteen that hung at her belt; Maketh had to help her uncap it, then hold the canteen to her lips as she drank. Phebe made a grimace, turned her face away and spat the water. "Tastes bitter as bile. Damn."

"Can you walk?"

Phebe held onto her shoulder and pulled herself to her feet, only to sag on her knees again. With her shaky left hand, she removed her helmet. A sheen of sweat covered her face and stuck her short-cropped hair to her head. "Well, I guess you'll have to go without me." She sounded eerily calm. "Send a postcard when you get to rendezvous point."

"I'm going nowhere without you!" An instant after Maketh had spoken, cold-thinking Cadet Tua caught up: at her normal pace, and assuming the ground would be even and easily walkable—which it wasn't—she would reach rendezvous point in two hours at best. From there, she could use the comm device to warn Mission Command that Cadet Zataire was injured, give them her whereabouts and let a squad go pick her up. No telling how long that would take. Cadet Tua refused to predict the outcome of a speed race between an unidentified poison circulating into a Human body and a squad of troopers to the rescue.

 _Speed race…_

She sprang to her feet and, careful not to get near the purple trees, went to look over the crest: about ten metres down at the bottom of the slope, the podracer lay coated in greenish slime.

"Well, worth a try," she said under her breath.

"What are you—" Phebe coughed again.

Maketh forced herself not to look at her, took the mech repair kit from her rucksack, and hopped down the slope. Soft black muck sucked at her boots. She could smell the rotten leaves through the helmet filter, and for once in her life she was thankful to have eaten nothing but ration bars since early morning.

She footslogged to the pilot's cockpit of the podracer; it lay slanted on its right side and a lizard scurried away from the seat when Maketh approached. The control panel seemed intact, and familiar; salvaged military equipment, why not? The dual control yokes couldn't be that much different from those of a TIE fighter or an AT-PT, and she had received basic training for both. With top grades. She switched on the flashlight on her helmet. On the bottom of the cockpit, the light revealed six pedals, spaced too far from each other for her legs—indeed, most normal Human's—to reach them all.

A weight sank over her shoulders, like another, invisible rucksack.

She shook her head. Not the moment to get unsettled. She tried what must be the primary ignition switch; the console sparkled into a life of blue and red indicating lights. They went off and within a fraction of a heartbeat flickered on again, the lights steady, the fuel indicator at half-full tank, and the console whirring.

Maketh let out a deep breath, took a deeper one in, her head dizzy with the stink of dead leaves, and fully lowered the switch. The whirr grew louder, something popped on one of the engines, a colony of mole-like tiny animals scuttled away from the turbines that spun faster and faster, the energy binders frizzled between the repulsors. Then a light went pulsing; a viewscreen marked out a section of the left engine in red, with a string of writing in Outer Rim Basic. She'd learned to read the blasted stuff—not on Lothal, her parents were better educated people than that, but at the academy. And it said something in… kriff, was that Huttese?

She almost punched the console, but a croaky noise overhead stopped her; maybe it was a cawing bird, maybe Phebe's cough.

"Fine. Fine. Okay. Mission comes first," she whispered to herself in-between gasps, jumped off the cockpit and went to see the left engine where the diagnostic screen said it was broken.

Finding the knocked-off component and the burnt fuse block was easy. Not so much bypassing and tightening the screws over the malfunction using an emergency toolkit that was meant to quick-fix blasters. Nothing exploded in her face, however, when she made another try with the switch to full ignition.

"Phebe!" she called. "I found a way to get you out of here! Can you come down on your own?"

She didn't answer.

"Phebe!"

Nothing. Up on the bulbous purple trees, Maketh caught a motion with the corner of her eye. She flung herself to the slope, scrambling up on all fours; the muck squelched all around her, but she didn't notice it until she was at Phebe's side again and hauling her to her feet. Phebe's bitten arm had turned so pale the shade veered on a faint blue tinge; Maketh's own uniform, instead, was blackened with mud.

Phebe squinted. Her eyes had a feverish glaze. "This is against the procedure," she said.

"Thanks for the reminder. Hold fast to me, okay? It's slippery—"

Phebe's weight dragged her down into a tumble. Mud got all over the visor and some seeped under her helmet to her mouth, cold and bitter and salty. Shaking, she pushed Phebe off her and pressed the little button to lift the helmet visor. Unfiltered, the hot stagnant air, brimming with the crashing smells of so many different plants, felt as if a rancor were breathing on her face. Not that the briefing data had mentioned rancors among the Baroondan fauna. But Phebe was sick, and a sick animal is an easy prey. How long until the swamp beasts would notice, and start coming their way?

Maketh stumbled onto the podracer's engine cable, half-buried under the mud, as she dragged and hoisted Phebe to the cockpit and onto the seat. The triple safety belt was long enough to strap both of them in. How large an alien monster had the pilot been?

Phebe stirred and moaned softly. Her eyes were tight shut and her teeth had started chattering.

"Hold fast, you heard me?" Ignoring the other cadet's silence, Maketh pulled the visor back down, wiped it as clean as possible with a not-too-grimy piece of her poncho, and flicked down the ignition switch. No nasty warning lights on the console this time, and the energy binders shot out a nice bolt of white electricity.

"Okay." Maketh breathed deeply. "That was the easy part. Now…" She tried a pedal, then the other, and the buttons and switches on the console. Then she pushed downwards the control yokes.

A thunder rent the jungle, and acceleration knocked her lungs empty and flattened her back to the seat.

#

For a while, everything turned into a blur.

Bursts of light and darkness, the rumble of the turbines, splashing water under the repulsor engines, bugs squashing on her helmet, the speed wind lashing at her arms, the pitching and lurching way the craft responded to every flick of the yokes. She fought to keep the speed below two-hundred klicks per hour, it seemed this podracer hadn't been built to go any slower.

There had been a sudden light, blinding, all-encompassing, and she thought she was dead. But her vision cleared and it was the sunlight, no jungle anymore at the side of the road—it was a road, dirt brown, going up a mountain. A bamboo bridge with a chasm in the middle—she didn't realise they were flying until her eyes fell downwards for a fraction of a second, and she let out a scream she couldn't hear, yanked up the yokes and pushed the gas pedal. This must be what it feels to be a proton torpedo. Then brakes again, once safe at the other end of the abyss.

She could see the towers of Baroo City, the planet's moons at different heights through a veil of steel grey clouds. At the outskirts of the city, the circuit gave way to a civilian street. She dodged one pedestrian, one landspeeder, and hit the brakes for good. They were yelling all around, Human-like and alien voices, she didn't understand and didn't care what. Her hand, curled up in the shape of the control yoke, flicked up the ignition switch. The turbines sputtered and died, the podracer dropped to the ground and, had it not been for the safety belt, Maketh would have thumped her head hard against the console.

"Look," said a voice in Basic, "they're Imperial cadets!"

A stormtrooper leaned into the cockpit and wrangled with the pin of the safety belt. It went off with a click.

"Kid, what in the nine hells were you doing?"

A column of black smoke was rising from the left engine.

Another voice said, "Get 'em away!" Maketh lost consciousness in the stormtrooper's arms, and they told her much later about the engine that shot up into the air and exploded twenty metres up, raining rooftops with shrapnel.

She wasn't happy to be already awake when Lieutenant Lukash jumped off his speeder before the soldier who was driving it had pulled it to full halt. Lukash looked around, fixed his eyes on her, bared his teeth and strode towards the crate Maketh was sitting on.

She hid behind her back the cup of caf the stormtrooper had bought her at a vending machine, and stood up on attention.

"I cannot believe it was you," Lukash said, putting his hands on his hips. "I refused to believe it."

"Sir, I can explain…" She wetted her lips. "With your permission, sir."

Lukash's eyes were as dark as obsidian. He gave a little sigh through his nose, and said, "Do explain, Cadet."

Maketh glanced around; the stormtrooper was still there, a few paces aside, on attention. She caught a minimal tilt of his head, a nod in her direction. "There was an attack. Cadet Zataire and I were halfway between rendezvous points Ryloth and Corellia. We—we lost our weapons and had to drop our kit to make a faster escape—"

"Your _weapons_ are your _life_ , Cadet! How many times do I have to repeat that to you dumb brats?" Lukash waved his arms in the air. Maketh steeled herself for a slapping. What came was a close second; Lukash was good at many officer things, including harangues. He interrupted the rant now and then, to let Maketh finish with her excuses; his verdict, of course, was that Cadet Zataire was a silly irresponsible child who should have been left to wait in the swamp, and Cadet Tua should have marched on to the rendezvous point and made her report at once from there—and only then would have followed orders to retreat, if Command had issued them.

Maketh listened still and stiff, with pins and needles in her eyes.

Lukash had just gotten to rant about the podracer, when his comlink beeped.

"Lieutenant," said a static-ridden voice Maketh didn't know, "this is Captain Zataire of the ISD _Lawbringer_. I am comming you all the way from a war zone over Seregar, so you better listen carefully."

"Yessir, I am, sir." Lukash shot Maketh a glare, and stepped away out of her hearing range, cupping his free hand over the comlink.

"Hell of a dressing-down," said the stormtrooper after some time. She just nodded in silence, but her face must be so bad that he quickly walked up to Maketh and patted her on the shoulder. "We're going to be telling your story for a while, y'know? The lil' cadet who could drive a podracer. You should apply to the spec ops forces someday, kid. I hear they like crazies."

"That guy who's talking to the lieutenant," she whispered, "that's Phebe's father. I… what if she doesn't…?"

"We took her to the medics as fast as we could, kid. Granted, couldn't do as fast as you did with that rocket death trap—" The trooper stood back, as the lieutenant approached again.

"I have received orders to believe your every word, Cadet Tua," said Lukash. He wasn't smiling, but his voice had lost the edge of anger. "According to current procedure, a cadet may interrupt the drill on their own initiative solely in case of enemy attack. Once all the other cadets are extracted, we will sweep the area."

"Yes sir, I understand, sir."

Lukash glanced, with the slightest waggle of his eyebrows, at a broken window on the upper storey of a building nearby. His drab uniform was being dotted with the dark marks of raindrops, and only then did Maketh notice her face was wet, too. Good to know it wasn't from tears.

"Sir, permission to ask a question?"

"Cadet Zataire, isn't it?"

"…Will she be all right, sir?"

Lukash rolled his eyes. "I doubt she would have commed her father and begged him to put a good word for you two in my ears, had she been dead by now."

#

Phebe was out of the medbay by chowtime. The whole class felt grateful to her for the cancelled drill. Under the mess table they sat at, someone passed on a flask of something Maketh preferred not to drink. Phebe's arm was still abnormally pale, and she was more than eager to pull her sleeves up and show the difference, though she demanded twenty credits up front to lift the patch and show the bite mark; no cadet had cash at the ready.

"Nah, we didn't see the enemy," Phebe kept saying, waving a dismissive hand. "We just shot back and ran. And hey, we're still getting KP for _wasting Imperial supplies_. Not cool. New Swamp Survival Lesson Number 1, guys: whatever you do, never drop your blaster."

But there were more questions about the podracer, just as the stormtrooper had predicted. Maketh found herself describing it, over and over again, word for word, as flying a TIE fighter without stabilisers and acceleration dampeners.

A couple days later, KP duty put Maketh at the stormtroopers' mess, handing out ladlefuls of soup.

One of the troopers, not much older than herself without the helmet on, beamed when he saw her. "You got off light, kid. That's great."

She shrugged in her stained apron.

"By the way, we went and _swept the area_ , like your lieutenant said." He did a good imitation of Lukash's Coruscanti accent. "We found your guns and kits, too. Nearest settlement was some fishermen's village ten klicks away."

Maketh found herself holding her breath, and her forehead sweat more than it was due to the soup pot wafting steam to her face.

"My mates say they found a hidden cellar with weapons inside—Seppie remainders, that sorta old trash—after the flametroopers had made a beachside barbecue with the huts."

"Get moving, pal," said the next soldier down the waiting line, who'd kept her helmet on, "you're scaring the kiddo and I'm hungry!"

She wanted to say she was not scared. But she just gripped the ladle to steady her hand.

Sure, she'd saved her friend—well, her sister-in-arms—and pulled a hero stunt, too. But what of the price? Fear, perjury, unnecessary death. Never did she have a sharper sense, in her sixteen standard years, and wouldn't have a worse one until a Grand Moff landed on Lothal, that a military career wasn't her calling.

* * *

Author's note: This story was written for the SWR Imperial Contest, and written a bit more hastily than I'd imagined. Captain Zataire appears in the _Spark of Rebellion_ novelisation, where he mentions a daughter of his in the Imperial navy; every other detail about Phebe Zataire, including her first name, is my invention. I couldn't resist stealing Lieutenant Lukash from _The Good Soldier_ _Švejk_ , and the fact that he sounds almost semi-competent in this fic speaks volumes about his WWI Habsburg army namesake.

Grabvine Gateway was a playable racing track in _Episode I: Racer_. I hated it. Absolutely hated it. Took me weeks to beat it. Nevertheless, Baroonda was one of my favourite worlds in the game. Ahh, conflicting feelings.


End file.
